The present disclosure relates generally to data leak prevention systems and methods.
Electronic data communication is ubiquitous. Business practices and commerce often require data to be transmitted securely, such that customer, internal business, and/or legal standards are met. One goal of these standards is to prevent the unauthorized transmission of information and attachments. In attempts to achieve this goal, policies have been implemented that require labels and tags, such as “private”, “confidential”, “restricted”, “sensitive”, and the like to be added to various documents and data transmissions. Other policies require keywords to be included in the actual document contents (e.g., persistent terminology that distinguishes one class of sensitive documents from another class of sensitive documents). Ensuring that these policies are effected may be difficult, at least in part because of differing levels of employee competence (e.g., new to company, job, or role; temporary replacement), genuine mistakes (e.g., distraction, forgetfulness, lack of concentration), or a lack of up to date corporate, legal, or other policy information. Policy changes may require an adequate employee training which is delivered in parallel with or shortly after the changes have been made. It is possible, however, that there could be a delay between the desired policy change and the actual roll-out. When policies are not enforced, sensitive data/information may be leaked. Data leak incidents range from, for example, sending a sensitive e-mail to the wrong address to uploading a confidential document instead of a conference submission; and from saving an unprotected document backup on a USB device to printing a sensitive document on a widely accessible printer and then forgetting that the document was printed. Methods used to prevent data leaks include, for example, analysis of outgoing information on gateway-based systems, secure erasure solutions, and USB lock-out and mandatory encryption solutions. The existing methods are office-based leak prevention mechanisms that may not be suitable for data leaks from out-of-office devices (e.g., DVD, USB, external hard drives, etc.).